P. Carl

Robin Abrahams

Dan Kennedy

Professors as Information Censors

On a l’impression que le dessin est de moins en moins toléré, que c’est une forme d’expression qui, même au sein des médias, est encombrante. Un peu trop atypique, un peu trop libre…  Même dans les grands journaux, les dessins deviennent extrêmement consensuels, il n’y a pas beaucoup de prise de risque éditoriale, les dessins deviennent un peu insipides.  [You get the impression that cartooning has become less and less tolerated, that it’s a form of expression which, even in the heart of the media, is burdensome.  A bit too uncommon, a little too free…  Even in the big newspapers, cartoons have become extremely consensual, there’s not much editorial risk taking, the cartoons become a bit insipid.  —trans gts]

—Riss, editor of Charlie Hebdo

It is the fifth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist massacre.  Are Northeastern University students aware of that?  As an alumnus of NU and out of respect for the murdered cartoonists, I request that the student editors of The Huntington News override the decision made by one of their professors, Dan Kennedy, to censor information.  Indeed, Professor Kennedy refused to circulate to his students a cartoon (see wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2020/01/democracy-under-siege.html), which I’d sketched satirizing The Boston Globe.  I’d sent it to the columnists depicted in the cartoon, as well as to the editor and several other journalists.  In a separate email, I’d also sent it to Professor Kennedy, who teaches in the School of Journalism.

To Professor Dan Kennedy, Northeastern University:

It is highly likely you will choose NOT to present the attached cartoon to your Northeastern University journalist students… and that would represent in a nutshell your problem as a professor of journalism.  Why not address it, instead of ignoring it?  

Professor Kennedy was the only one who responded.  For that, I praise him.  From my experience, The Boston Globe tends to ignore/censor hardcore criticism with its regard, something that clearly ought to be a focus for professors of journalism.  Professor Kennedy’s response was brief.

Hi, George —

I like the one of me and Renée Loth much better.

No, I won't be presenting it to my students. It's puerile.

DK

Apropos, the other cartoon, which Professor Kennedy refers to and also refused to circulate amongst his students can be examined here:  wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2020/01/renee-loth-and-dan-kennedy.html.  I just posted it.  “Oh, my God, this cartoon is fantastic,” had written the professor, but again he would not circulate it amongst his students.  In 2013, I’d posted a different cartoon again satirizing the professor, and again he would not circulate it amongst his students (see wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2013/07/rosanna-cavannah-and-dan-kennedy.html).  Moreover, last June I’d posted an “Open Letter to Northeastern University School of Journalism.”  Not one NU professor would circulate the letter to his or her students.  In fact, The Huntington News would not respond.  It can be examined here:  wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2019/06/northeastern-university-school-of.html.  

In any case, rather than issue a general kill-the-messenger message-killing epithet, “puerile,” why not instead contemplate precisely what points are made in the cartoon, then via reason and fact prove the points faulty.  That should be precisely what a professor and any thinking individual does.  But when one is bound by ideology and/or career connections, one tends NOT to do that.  Sadly, to dismiss a message that one does not like with a simple epithet has become a common practice today.  Hopefully, professors are not teaching and encouraging it.  

Was Professor Kennedy’s a worthy response?  Shouldn’t his students be able to make their own determinations?  Should professors serve as academic censors of information?  In essence, would the cartoon NOT encourage debate amongst students of journalism?  And isn’t vigorous debate a prime cornerstone of a thriving democracy, even at a school of journalism?  For a professor to dismiss the clear message in the cartoon as “puerile” is troubling.  

How perchance is it “puerile,” for example, to openly criticize a highly-biased newspaper’s refusal to publish anything highly critical of its editor?  How perchance is it “puerile” to quote the puerile statements of two of its columnists, while simultaneously presenting the newspaper’s latest self-vaunting focus, “Democracy Under Siege”?  Indeed, how does publishing such puerile columns like “Miss Conduct” and “Love Letters” serve to solve the democracy-under-siege problem evoked by the Boston Globe?  How does the latter’s rejection of hardcore criticism/satire like that presented in the cartoon solve the democracy-under-siege problem?  How is it possible that Professor Kennedy seems incapable of grasping these fundamental questions?   Might the Boston Globe constitute one of the hands feeding him?  Any careerist, academic or other, knows and obeys the basic career taboo:  thou shalt not bite the hands that feed.  

How is it “puerile” to criticize/satirize the Boston Globe as a likely contributor to the democracy-under-siege problem?  Might Professor Kennedy (like him or not is irrelevant!) also be a contributor to the problem?  If so, that would explain his dismissal of the satire as “puerile,” thus not worthy of his students’ attention.  Newspapers, like the Boston Globe, publish satirical cartoons, but not when the satire targets them.  With good-taste censors like Professor Kennedy in academic positions and Globe Editor McGrory in journalism positions, democracy will remain under siege.  In fact, one must wonder what Brian McGrory and his journalist colleagues think democracy is.  Do they think it is implementation of ideology, restriction of freedom of expression, and limited debate in accord with the parameters of their particular ideology?  

Finally, for several decades now, as a Northeastern alumnus, I have tried in vain to get the library directors at the university to subscribe (only $20/year) to The American Dissident, a 501c3 nonprofit journal devoted to literature, democracy and dissidence.   So, how can Northeastern, year after year, ask me to contribute money?  Well, instead, I will now contribute a free subscription, but only if the librarian in charge assures that issues will be placed on the shelf and not thrown into the garbage.  The cartoon in question will appear in the next issue of the journal due out in April.  If the librarian in charge accepts the offer, then Professor Kennedy’s students will be able to circumvent his censorship of information and make their own determinations as to the worthiness or unworthiness of that particular expression of freedom of speech.  And the same goes, if the student newspaper editor decides to publish it.  

The American Dissident, unlike the bulk of journals and newspapers, not only brooks tough criticism regarding it and its editor (me), but encourages and publishes the harshest received in each and every issue.  How sad that the Boston Globe rejects that modus operandi, de facto preferring “democracy under siege.”  How about The Huntington News?  Journalism constitutes a part of the democracy-under-siege problem in America.   If it continues to deny that fact, as it tends to do, how can that possibly help resolve the problem?  If student journalists continue in that darkness, how can that help resolve the problem?   In the realm of journalism, careerism and ideology, which ineluctably oppose truth and reason, constitute two of the prime culprits.  

Riss concludes (see above quote), “I think that free expression is in itself a sufficiently fundamental value, which has a future if cartoonists have the courage to inject into their drawings courage and strength.  If it’s only to present nice cartoons which upset nobody, they might as well not sketch at all.”  [« Je pense que la liberté d’expression est déjà une valeur fondamentale suffisante.  Ce genre a de l’avenir si les dessinateurs ont le courage de donner à leur dessin de la force. Si c’est juste pour faire de l’illustration et des dessins gentils qui ne dérangent personne, autant ne rien dessiner du tout » —trans gts]

In sincerity, again, I thank Professor Kennedy for responding… because from his brief criticism, I was inspired to write this essay.  Please, professors, avoid the epithets and embrace vigorous debate and freedom of expression, democracy’s cornerstones.  

Renee Loth and Dan Kennedy

Democracy Under Siege

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

White Women Bad...

Although the media has always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense or at least the effort to be objective today. We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that.  Standards are out the window, I mean you read one story after another or hear it and it’s all based on one anonymous administration official, former administration official. That’s not journalism, that’s horseshit.

—Lara Logan, former “60 Minutes” correspondant, gang-raped in Egypt

“Powerful journalism on tap,” a self-congratulatory motto, is what the Boston Globe considers the product of its  journalists, who seem to be mostly ideology spinners, as opposed to unbiased rude-truth tellers. Now and then, I challenge the spinners.  “Black Racists with Press Badges” is one of those challenges, rejected by the Globe.  It concerned an anti-white racist op-ed authored by Renée Graham, assistant editor/columnist for the Globe.  Graham did not respond to it.  However, Marjorie Pritchard, Daily Op-Ed Page Editor, briefly responded:  

Since this is a direct rebuttal, I will forward it to our letters editor, Matt Bernstein, for consideration. Renée’s piece appeared in our opinion section. 

Bernstein did not respond.  For me, it seemed scandalous that an assistant editor for a newspaper, Graham, could continually write anti-white racist op-eds without being reprimanded.  For Pritchard, however, it was somehow excusable because, well, Graham publishes her racist diatribes in the opinion section.  Graham is a local Eugene Robinson (Washington Post), who also constantly scribbles unchecked anti-white, racist op-eds. Graham’s latest white bad/black good column, “White Women: from Slave Owners to Trump Voters,” argues: “Despite months of polls, few predicted that a majority of white women would shun Hillary Clinton in favor of a racist and misogynist who bragged about his non-consensual grabbing of women’s vaginas and faced multiple accusations of sexual assault and misconduct.”  Graham fails to wonder why those white women should have instead supported a proven corrupt political hack instead.  Not a word is mentioned about Hillary’s continuing saga of unaccountable corruption (e.g., bleach bit, the foundation, and the Mueller probe).  Also, Graham seems to believe that “accusations,” especially when they fit her narrative, are the equivalent of unquestionable guilt.  

When one is devoid of cogent counter-arguments, one tends to reach into the arsenal of ad hominem.  That’s what the Grahams tend to do.  The idea of “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility” has become an obsession for those like Graham, and obsessions always blind the obsessed to reason and facts apt to counter the obsession.  The latest Graham op-ed is an account of an interview with (a book advertisement for) black assistant professor of history (University of California at Berkeley) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, apparently required reading for Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, Democrat-party blackface poster boy.  Graham, of course, does not mention the latter’s connection to that party, which is evidently her party.  

Jones-Rogers shares the same anti-white bigotry as Graham and states, “I see time and time again in my research that when white women are given a choice, they overwhelmingly choose to be empowered by whiteness, and to embrace white supremacy.”  Now, what does that even mean?  And why did white woman Elizabeth Warren not do that?  Affirmative Action preference treatment, that’s why!   And might some black women like Jones-Rogers and Graham choose “to be empowered” by blackness, and to “embrace” black supremacy?  And where are the statistics to back the Jones-Rogers’ assertion?  And why doesn’t Graham, as a journalist, pose that question?

Jones-Rogers argues that “A small majority, but nevertheless an important majority of white women embraced Trump and what he stands for—embracing, ultimately, white supremacy.”  Sadly, she provides no concrete proof of that claim.  Graham does not demand such proof and declares, “With each election post-mortem comes the same refrain: a majority of white women vote against their own best interest.”  In other words, Graham’s is nothing but a Democrat-party-line monologue in which somehow identity politics, pc et al constitute the “best interest” for white women.  Ah, but Jones-Rogers argues, “They’re making a choice, and the choice is to invest in white supremacy.  They’ve drawn a line, and the line is a racial one.”  In other words, vote against the Democrat party, and somehow you vote for “white supremacy.”  Might the Democrat party today therefore be the party of black supremacy?  But clearly in the South, it was once the party of white supremacy and slavery.  Have the Grahams and Jones-Rogers forgotten KKK Senator Robert Byrd hugging Hillary?

But the Grahams and Jones-Rogers will rarely if ever evoke the reality of slavery because that reality inevitably upsets their rigid black good/white bad ideology.  They will not mention the many black slave traders and even slaveholders (over 1,000 in Louisiana), the relatively few whites who held slaves (5% or less), and the whites who were slaves.  After all, the term slave comes from Slav.  The Slavs were white!  

Graham praises:  “With her book, Jones-Rogers captures the echoes of what happens when America’s greatest atrocity — and who participated in it — is deliberately misunderstood and unchallenged.”  But again who participated in it?  Who are deliberately misunderstanding it, if not Graham and Jones-Rogers?  Whites and blacks, though relatively few of both races, participated in it!  The Democrat party had wanted slavery to continue.  Graham fails to mention that!  The Republican party ended slavery thanks to armies of mostly white soldiers.  Graham fails to mention that!  After all, white bad, black good. 

Graham joyfully agrees with Jones-Rogers’ assessment that white women “were not passive bystanders.  They were co-conspirators.”  Some white women were co-conspirators, NOT all white women, as that sentence seems to infer.  Just how difficult would it have been to add the word “some” to it?  “That’s also what they [white women] were, centuries later, when they helped put Trump in the White House,” concludes Graham, whose logic is severely crippled.  Ideology always cripples logic.  Graham needs to somehow open her hermetically-sealed (racist-obsessed) mind and let reason enter into it.  She needs to denounce black supremacy and black participation in the slave trade and the existence of non-white slavery today in Africa.  Sadly, she will likely not do that.  Hardcore ideologues rarely change.

Finally, the divide is ever increasing in America, thanks to the Grahams and Jones-Rogers and their identity politics ideology, to the point where perhaps only one solution exists.  Intense left-wing indoctrination with its tools of censorship, banning, and shaming has been the purported solution for quite a while.  But indoctrination, no matter how severe, cannot seem to eliminate truth.  Numerous examples of its failure to do that exist from the USSR to Cuba, China, and North Korea.  Perhaps the only solution today is to divide America, once and for all, into two separate nations:  a nation of freedom and a nation of left-wing indoctrination.  Many free slaves formed a separate country in Africa:  Liberia.  Why did they leave America?  Or rather why did many others not leave America?  And what has become of black-ruled Liberia today?  The Grahams and Jones-Rogers use the past—distort the past—, to stoke the flames of dissension… and by doing so maintain the power they wield.  The Grahams and Jones-Rogers are examples of black privilege, black fragility, and probably black supremacy.   (Thankfully, all blacks do not think as they do.)  They have voice.  We, the plebes, do not.  This counter op-ed will likely not appear in the Boston Globe for that precise reason. 

Jeff Jacoby -- The Career Columnist Quandary

Needless to say, the Boston Globe would not publish, let alone respond to, the following cartoon and counter essay, regarding one of its own, columnist Jeff Jacoby.  After all, it broke a cardinal rule:  Thou shalt NOT criticize the journalists...

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Trolls Here, Trolls There, Trolls Everywhere!

Career Columnists vs. We, the People, uh, Trolls

Thou shalt not bite the hands that feed constitutes the fundamental problem confronting newspaper columnists, or any other so-called professionals, for that matter.  In the case of Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe columnist, criticism of the Boston Globe, its editor, and, of course, other columnists constitutes that taboo.  For example, Jacoby will certainly not write a column decrying the egregious anti-white racist writing of his fellow columnist, Renee Graham.  And sadly, his silence serves, like it or not, to support the black good/white bad narrative pushed by the latter.  Over the years, I’ve submitted a number of highly critical op-eds, including several critical of Graham’s blatant racism (see Black Racists with Press Badges” and “Racism, Racism, Racism Ad Nauseam, Ad Infinitum, Ad Obscurum") to the Globe, all of which were categorically rejected.  After all, I, plebe, uh, troll, have no voice.  

The idea of career columnists, who end up forming an elite group, is a bad one, because it demands one voice over and over each week, as opposed to different citizen, uh, troll voices.  It requires the career columnist to come up with something each week for his or her weekly column… and in the absence of a good idea, fluff is always a viable option.  And indeed Jacoby’s latest column is a good example of the latter, “Column-writing in the Internet age is much better. And much worse."  Sure, there’s the opportunity of plebe letters to the editor, but that venue demands very short critiques.  Also, there’s the opportunity of a guest editorial, but that demands the approval of the editor.  Try getting an op-ed critical of an editor published in the editor’s newspaper!

“I have made a living writing opinion commentary for mainstream newspapers since the 1980s,” notes Jacoby in his column.  In essence, that constitutes the very crux of the career columnist quandary because “making a living” (career) inevitably must conflict with truth telling.  Career is the crux of the professor problem, the politician problem, the lawyer problem, the journalist problem, the poet problem, and on and on.  Career vs. truth!  As a former professor, I was able to experience that problem first hand.  But unlike most, I chose truth over career.  In fact, I was fired from my last teaching job at American Public University because I disobeyed a direct order from my bosses to cease expressing my point of view regarding criticism lodged against me.  How many newspaper columnists would choose  truth over career?   Likely, very, very few… because money (and collegiality), for most professionals, always tends to trump truth.  Would Jacoby and other careerists be able to fully comprehend that quandary?  Have they ever even contemplated it?  Self-satisfaction (ego), of course, demands a failure to comprehend.  For those incapable of understanding, Solzhenitsyn’s powerful essay, “Live Not by Lies,” ought to be required reading.  

Jacoby does not, of course, address in his column the questions I address here.  What he does, instead, is address a more or less superficial issue:  writing columns in the age of the internet.  “I leave it to others to sketch the view of the digital landscape from 30,000 feet,” he notes. “Here’s what it looks like at ground level to one guy who has been in the opinion business since the era when opinions were crafted on typewriters.”  Well, opinions should not be crafted on typewriters… or computers, but rather in the mind and with TRUTH and FACTS always as the editor, not the BOSS as the editor.   

Careerists always cave.  Truth-tellers do not; they fight vigorously against the vague orthodoxy that tries always to get them to cave/to conform/to be collegial.  Jacoby cites an example, though to simply support his superficial account of the wonders of the internet, “In a 2012 column about vulgarity, I referred to a cable program that used the F-word 38 times in a four minutes. I wasn’t about to quote the scene—but I could supply a link to a video clip.”  Why does Jacoby write the F-word?  Why is that less vulgar than “fuck”?  For me, the two are the same, though evidently the former contains a touch of cowardly conformity and superficial politesse.  Careerists embrace word control.  Truth-tellers fight against it.  “Vulgar” is a subjective determination, made by faceless cultural apparatchiks and educrats, in an effort to control vocabulary and opinion, and deflect from truth.  

      Jacoby laments, “And while the extraordinary vistas opened up by the Web have made the job of a columnist so much more efficient and rewarding, the new norms of online culture are sour, angry, and tense.”  But “sour, angry, and tense” are simply epithets used to kill the messenger in an effort to deflect from truth, be it sour truth, angry truth, or tense truth.   The terms are used to denigrate truth or opinion, which the denigrator does not like and cannot, or fails to, challenge via reason and fact. For me, I’d rather speak the “vicious” truth, than receive an award like Jacoby:  the Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism…  or rather for Excellence in Turning a Blind Eye Regarding Bias Journalism!  

Jacoby laments, “the marketplace of ideas seems always at the point of exploding. The nastiness of social media, the bile of online comment sections, the viciousness of trolls—all are only too familiar. It is impossible to write these days without being aware of the online mob ready to pounce.”  Well, I surely must be part of that “online mob” because, well, I am a plebe, uh, troll, whereas Jacoby is an elite prize-winning journalist.  Unlike him, I openly express, for example, my full disgust against the platform provided by the Globe to egregious racists like Renee Graham.  

Elite career columnists, journalists and newspaper editors have grown thinner and thinner skin over the years just like academics and poets.  They cannot bear criticism.  How easy it has become for them and other establishment cogs to reject hard-core criticism with simple phrases like “go away troll” (poet Eileen Myles—see “Dyke Poet, Smyke Poet, Who Gives a Damn!”) or “the shrillness of your rants” (editor Chris Busa, Provincetown Art—See “BULLSEYE”).  In essence, just call the writer of unwanted criticism—no matter how factual and logical—a “troll.”  Jacoby’s entire essay is an anti-alt-opinion screed against so-called “trolls.”  He laments, “Too many readers have no interest in absorbing a column’s argument or weighing its merits. They read instead to validate beliefs they already hold. They desire not to better understand ideas they oppose, but to see those ideas denounced, refuted, and mocked.”  

Why has it become so difficult for columnists like Jacoby and Graham to brook, let alone encourage, alt-opinions?  That’s the real problem, not trolls!  As editor of a small literary journal, I always encourage and publish the harshest criticism lodged against me and the journal.  What’s the big deal?  Well, apparently, that is a big deal!  Jacoby concludes, ever lamenting, as if somehow he were forced to read comments about his columns:  “Opinion columns aren’t tweets, but we live now in a culture that conducts far more of its political conversation on social media than on op-ed pages. The norms of that culture have adjusted accordingly. The results haven’t been pretty. Just ask a columnist.”  

Well, if you can’t take the heat, get the hell out of the limelight, dear well-paid elite columnists!  Now, do you think the Globe and its editor, Brian McGrory, who I dared satirize in a cartoon, “The Journalists—Racism Here, Racism There, Racism Everywhere,” a year ago, will publish this counter opinion?   In fact, that summarizes the very crux of the Boston Globe problem, the one Jacoby will never address in a column…  

Renee Loth

What Is a Journalist?

The fundamental flaw in journalist Renee Loth’s Boston Globe op-ed, “Julian Assange may be a hero to some, but he’s no journalist,” is its failure to define what precisely constitutes a journalist.  Does  egregious bias define journalist today?  

Loth argues, “Full stop, please. Assange is many things: swashbuckling egotist, gleeful disrupter of the status quo, unwanted guest of the Ecuadorean government holed up in its London embassy. But a hard-working journalist he is not.”  

Does Loth believe that disrupting the corrupt “status quo” is a bad thing—is something “hard-working” journalists do not do/are not supposed to do?  Well, it seems so.  Ideology can blind  journalists like Loth to the point where they cannot see their faults, even when egregious.  A journalist like her ought to avoid using highly-subjective terms like “egotist.”  Journalists should stick to facts, reason, objectivity, and equality of treatment (e.g., for blacks and whites/for Democrats and Republicans).  Far too many do not do that!  Career inevitably trumps truth… for journalists and all other careerists.  

Loth argues, “Quite apart from the question of whether the United States should prosecute Assange for publishing classified government documents — and I think it would set a dangerous precedent at a time when press freedoms are under attack by the president himself — we need to draw some distinctions between his methods and those of mainstream reporters.”

Well, what about Hillary Clinton’s egregious, unpunished lying about the way how she handled classified government documents?  Equality under the law?  Equality in the eyes of so-called journalists?  Isn’t Trump justified in attacking the highly-biased journalists who constantly attack him?  

Loth argues, “WikiLeaks receives and distributes raw data, some of it damaging personal information of no legitimate public interest, and then sits back and enjoys the fallout.”  And yet who defines what constitutes “no legitimate public interest”?  The Democrat Party?  Journalist shills for the Democrat Party?  The concept of “public interest” is highly nebulous and can be highly partisan indeed.  Loth ought to be aware of that!  And if she is then why does she not mention it?
  

At least Loth stipulates a fact, though reluctantly:  “Although Assange is a hero to many who advocate government transparency, and although he won Australia’s highest journalism honor in 2011, to my (admittedly old-school) mind, he’s an activist.”  Does part of that old-school mind include biased reporting?  Are not most of the journalists at the Boston Globe essentially “activists” for the Democrat Party?  After all, the Globe openly endorsed Hillary Clinton!  How can journalists who endorse one political candidate over another possibly be objective?  Isn’t Loth an “activist” against Trump?  Loth seems to argue that journalists who are “activists” are not journalists.  In that sense, she self-incriminates! 

Loth argues, “Assange doesn’t generally do the tedious work of cross-checking documents, interviewing sources, seeking official responses, and providing expert analysis. That isn’t the WikiLeaks model.”  Well, apparently, it isn’t the Boston Globe model either.  Cite Assistant Editor Renee Graham’s highly racist rant against the white teenagers of Covington Catholic High School (see https://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2019/01/renee-graham.html).  Did Graham bother to do any research at all?  In fact, it seems she purposefully ignored the research done by others and stands by her highly faulty account even today.  No apology at all was ever issued!   

Loth states, “Yes, WikiLeaks has been declared a media organization by a tribunal in the United Kingdom, strengthening the claim that Assange deserves protections afforded working journalists, but US laws regarding press freedom are different from Britain’s.”  And yet why should judges have the power to decide whether or not one is a journalist?  Loth ought to have posed that very question.  Corrupt, highly-biased judges exist!  Why should they have the right to make such a determination?  

Loth concludes, “This has been a brutal few weeks in a brutal decade for journalism."  Well, it has also been a brutal decade for free-speech advocates, due partially to journalists like Loth and Graham who choose to ignore the struggle of such advocates and not report on their many stories.  Amazingly, no result  on the Boston Globe website appeared, for example, when I searched “Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.”  Do Globe journalists like Loth even know who she is?  And if not, why not?

Loth argues, “The tactics employed by Assange — which blur or eliminate the lines between news, propaganda, activism, and spying — only embolden true authoritarian regimes to imprison, torture, and kill journalists. Let’s focus on protecting them.”  Again, those very tactics are employed by Loth, Graham, and other so-called journalists of the Boston Globe!  Let the Globe clean up its act before criticizing others for doing what it does!  

Rather than focusing on protecting journalists, perhaps journalists ought to focus on eliminating their egregious biases and m.o. of constant backslapping and self-congratulating.  They ought to focus on facts and reason and not oppose facts and reason when facts and reason counter bias.  The Globe would not publish my challenge of Graham’s highly faulty reportage, nor would it respond regarding Loth’s.  And so again, one is left with the highly nebulous term, “journalist.”  What is a journalist?  Well, Dan Kennedy, Associate Journalism Professor at Northeastern University, one of my alma maters, regards Loth as “…one of the city’s most accomplished journalists…”  No definition needed, of course.

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NB:  Rather than swallow vacuous, undefined, and self-congratulating memes like “real journalism matters” (Washington Post), it is best that a citizen think and pose questions, as in what the hell is “real journalism”?  Is it biased journalism?  Is it identity-politics journalism?  Is it not-reporting-on-certain-stories journalism?  Is it rejecting of uncomfortable-facts-and- opinions journalism?  Also, it is best that a citizen gain experience by actually testing the waters of journalism reality.  The following are some of my tests.  When I was a professor at Fitchburg State College (now university), the student newspaper, The Point, and the local newspaper, The Sentinel, both refused to report on my fight with the university.  The Advocate refused to publish an account of my being attacked and robbed by three blacks in Baton Rouge.  The Barnstable Patriot refused to publish my criticism of its praise for a candidate for a local Public Works position. The Cape Cod Times refused and still refuses to report on the permanent banning without warning or due process in 2012 of me from my neighborhood library, Sturgis Library.  My very civil rights are being denied today because I am prohibited from attending any cultural or political events held there.  As a rare open critic of its editor, Paul Pronovost, my opinions will never be published in that newspaper.  The Provincetown Banner refused to publish my criticism of the Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown and its use of poetry and art as a tourist magnet.  The Boston Globe refuses to publish my criticism of its anti-white racist assistant editor/columnist Renee Graham, likely another "one of the city’s most accomplished journalists."  Regarding college student editors, rarely will they publish criticism I send regarding their professors.  Thus is the reality of journalism today...  

Renee Graham

Black Racists with Press Badges

Black Racism Thrives—Two Wrongs (Somehow) Make a Right in PC-landia

[Well, of course, the Boston Globe refused to publish this letter to the editor.  After all, it is not an anti-Trump screed like those regurgitated weekly by its assistant editor/columnist Renee Graham.  Far too many journalists cannot bear truths that counter their ideological bent, which is why many Americans today rightfully view them negatively. As far as I am aware, Graham NEVER apologized for her shameful op-ed!]  

Why does the Boston Globe continue to provide a platform for blatant racist and incessant anti-white stereotyper Renee Graham?  That in itself served to diminish the press and enhance the thought that it had indeed become the enemy of the people.  After all, wasn’t racism an enemy of the people?  And if so, then backing, via paycheck and job, a racist like Graham certainly supported that very notion!    

In her latest column, “White America, come get your children,” Graham stated:  “Of course, President Trump is defending those smug white teenagers who mocked a Native American man last week at an indigenous people’s march in Washington, D.C.”  Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Graham chose to ignore new information that essentially and clearly disproved that the white teenagers were the aggressors!  

The problem with a racist ideologue like Graham is that facts and reason become entirely immaterial whenever they counter the narrative; in Graham’s case, white bad/black good.  For her and those like her, freedom of expression, as in wearing a red Trump hat, is not a basic human right, but rather an expression of racism.  How, one must wonder, could Graham actually ignore the blatant hatred and violent racist taunts of those black adult males directed against those white teenagers, who did not utter any racist words at all?   

“Look at all these dusty ass crackers with that racist garbage on.  Look at these dirty ass crackers.  Can’t stand in the sun for 5 minutes.”  

“Y’all dirty-ass little crackers, your day is coming.”

“A bunch of incest babies!  A bunch of babies made out of incest!” 

“Yall got one nigger in the crowd!”   

“I’m warning you nigger!”  

“Why you got all these cracker hats on and your coon ass wanna fight your brothers?”

“You nigga, you nigga with all these racist-ass crackers with red hats on…” 

“Get your old uncle Tom ass outta here!”  (see https://vladtepesblog.com/2019/01/21/aaand-its-even-worse-than-we-thought-high-school-students-really-and-truly-harassed-and-bullied-by-fake-vets-and-leftist-agitators/)

Even left-wing SPLC argued that those blacks are “obsessed with hatred for whites and Jews.”  Might Graham be one of them?  After all, isn’t she obsessed?  “Like a white hood, that cap represents a provocation and a threat,” she stated.  In other words, anybody who voted for Trump was somehow akin to a KKK member.  Yet doesn’t Graham mirror the opposite:  a black supremacist?  “And, yes, I do equate MAGA gear with traditional Klan attire,” she emphasized.  How had a woman so “obsessed with hatred for whites” ever rise to the position of Globe assistant editor?  Affirmative Action?

“Since the teens are white, they’re being infantilized…,” argued Graham.  And so somehow ALL white teens are infantilized.  How does Graham know?  Where are the statistics?  “It’s also now known that Phillips is a Vietnam veteran who served in the Marines,” she stated.  Yet in reality who cares what he did in the early 1970s?  Besides, Phillips had not served in Vietnam and seemed to be a serial liar.  Why didn’t Graham do a little research prior to coming to such erroneous conclusions?  “Nathan Phillips’s Interview with CNN Is Full of Falsehoods, Inconsistencies, and Nonsense,” noted David French of the National Review.  Ah, perhaps that magazine is a wing of the KKK?  Moreover, nobody but a blind ideologue could look at the long-version video and argue that those students had approached Phillips. 

“Each day, we pay dearly, and the costs to a nation which imprudently ignores racism and excuses racists becomes exponentially higher,” stated Graham.  Sadly, she and so many others like her choose to ignore “racism”… whenever it concerned black hatred against whites.  “To indict these terrible boys,” Graham concluded, “swathes of white America must indict itself, and the racist viciousness they’ve passed on to their children like a warped heirloom.”  Well, perhaps privileged columnists like her ought to indict themselves for passing on their own “racist viciousness” to their black children.  Clearly, Graham seeks to increase the great racial divide in America, as opposed to trying to diminish it…  

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NB:  I'd sent Graham and the Globe a different counter op-ed last year.  Nobody responded.  It can be found here:  http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2018/04/renee-graham.html.  Graham is a flaming hypocrite, who more recently published a column,  "Dissent Is Democracy.  No Wonder Trump Hates It."  So, Graham likes it?  Horseshit!

Marjorie Pritchard

Journalists Are NOT the Friend of the People 

The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority—yes, the damned compact Liberal majority…

—Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

We are not their [the people’s] enemy. But nor can we claim, until we chase our own bias out of the news, to be the honest watchdogs they need us to be.

—Nolan Finley, Detroit News

he following counter-editorial was rejected via form letter by The Boston Globe.  Journalists realize they have a huge voice, unlike plebes like me, and thus do not simply want to report objective facts.  They want to express their opinions.  And they do… far, far too often… overwhelming the front pages of their “newspapers” to the extent they severely blur the line between objective and subjective reportages.  

    The Boston Globe’s call for press criticism of Trump’s criticism of the press, “Journalists Are Not the Enemy,” is risible because the result has largely been nothing but press backslapping and press self-congratulating.   Add to that its egregious failure to address its egregious pro-Democrat-Party bias.  The press should not be in the business of endorsing political candidates.  The Boston Globe constantly does that on all levels (e.g., “the Globe’s editorial board endorsed Ayanna Pressley over longstanding incumbent Michael Capuano for the Democratic nomination in the Seventh Congressional District primary”).  

    "We are not the enemy of the people," argues Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor for the editorial page of the Boston Globe.  Journalists, however, become the “enemy” when they purposefully fail to cover stories that counter their favored narrative and stories that might disfavor their friends and other elites of their elite community. "I hope it would educate readers to realize that an attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable,” writes Pritchard.  “We are a free and independent press, it is one of the most sacred principles enshrined in the Constitution.” 

    When citizens do not personally test the waters of the press to determine just how open or closed or free or dependent it is, then they might end up swallowing the self-glorifying comments of journalists like Pritchard.  My own personal probes have largely indicated the press and journalists to be a lot more my enemies than friends.  

     The Advocate (Baton Rouge) refused, for example, to publish my account of being beaten and robbed by three blacks in Baton Rouge.  Why?  Likely because that countered its black good/white bad narrative.  The Cape Cod Times refused to publish an account of my being permanently banned w/o warning or due process from my neighborhood library.  Why?  Likely because that questioned and challenged a favored member of the local community elite.  The Concord Journal refused to publish an account of my arrest and incarceration for a day in Concord due to a non-violent dispute with a park ranger at Walden Pond.  Why?  Well, perhaps such news wouldn’t be of interest to the local chamber of commerce, which pimps Thoreau and Walden to push local tourism.  Over the years, I’ve sent a number of op-eds and cartoons critical of the editors of the Boston Globe, Cape Cod Times, Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Barnstable Patriot et al. Without explanation, they were systematically rejected.  Sadly, student newspaper editors seem to follow in that light, uh, darkness.  Indeed, over the years, I’ve sent them many critical essays and cartoons regarding their professors. The norm has been one of non-response.  On a rare positive note, The Telegram (Newfoundland) has published a few of my critical letters.   

    Because of my testing of the press waters, I’ve come to the conclusion that far too many journalists and editors are thin-skinned to the point where they are unable to bear any criticism with their regard.  Journalist Nolan Finley seems to agree:  “Our feelings are hurt in the news media. The president of the United States is calling us the Enemy of the People and we don’t like it.” 

   Moreover, how can the press continually proclaim to be free when it is ideologically and corporately-bound like the Boston Globe?  Arguing it to be free is purposeful hypocrisy and self-glorification. Rather than issuing self-congratulatory statements and entire editorials devoted to how great journalists and the press are, perhaps journalists ought to look in the mirror and deal with their egregious faults. Rather than a holier-than-thou mission to “educate readers,” perhaps it is time they educated themselves.  After all, it is more the fault of journalists, than of Trump, that public esteem for them has been so low.  

     Although journalists might not necessarily be the enemy of the people, they clearly are not necessarily the friend of the people.  How, for example, can I, a common citizen, consider them friends when they constantly reject my opinions and stories?  As editor of a 501 c3 nonprofit literary journal, I not only brook, but encourage and publish in each and every issue the harshest criticism received with my regard.  Why do most editors not do that?  In fact, I cannot think of another editor who does.

     “Today it [the free press] is under serious threat,” argues Pritchard with the other Globe editors in lock-step groupthink conformity.  But what has Trump actually done to the press?  Didn’t Obama constantly denigrate Fox News?  Did the Globe call him out for that? And why does Pritchard not mention the biggest threat to freedom—certainly far greater than the alleged Trump threat—posed by Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook? A common ideological connection might be the only explanation.   

   Pritchard and the other Globe editors argue:  “And it’s not a coincidence that this president—whose financial affairs are murky and whose suspicious pattern of behavior triggered his own Justice Department to appoint an independent counsel to investigate him—has tried so hard to intimidate journalists who provide independent scrutiny.”  But what about Hillary’s financial affairs?  And what about the Steele dossier and the Hillary connection to it?  Why that egregious omission?  What about the egregious bias of Mueller and the other investigators on his team?  Fair and impartial?  Hardly!  

   Pritchard and the other editors conclude, “The greatness of America is dependent on the role of a free press to speak the truth to the powerful.”  But what happens when press mandarins are part of the “powerful”?  Then the role of a free people is to speak the truth to the press. “To label the press ‘the enemy of the people’ is as un-American as it is dangerous to the civic compact we have shared for more than two centuries,” argues Pritchard and the others.  But when the press becomes the Pravda for the left, then it is the enemy of those who do not share its ideological bent.  Indeed, the term enemies of the people was used by left-wing Stalinists to demonize those who did not share their ideological bent.  

    Like the Boston Globe, the Cape Cod Times published its own editorial, “Identifying the real enemy of the people,” as part of the Democrat Party-media’s effort to backslap and self-congratulate, while denigrating Trump.  The editorial like the Globe’s is absolutely devoid of any attempt to address the press’ own fundamental fault: egregious Democrat-Party bias.  It characterizes, not objectively, Trump’s criticism of the press as a “vitriolic stream of hatred.”  The press has manifested over and again its incapacity for objectivity where Trump is concerned.  And that is the crux of its own problem.  “Hatred” is a highly subjective term, which is why hate speech, for example, is not and should not be separated from free speech in accord with the First Amendment.  Hatred for thee is perhaps satire and criticism for me.  Editor Paul Pronovost needs to eliminate the subjective inferences and insults and provide concrete, accurate facts. He argues that “Today, the Cape Cod Times joins newspapers across the country in calling attention to this onslaught on the media to highlight the danger to democracy that occurs when a self-styled demagogue uses his access to the same media he proclaims to hate to sow seeds of confusion, discontent and distrust.” 

   But how can Pronovost be so blind as to not notice how incredibly anti-Trump the media has been from day one?  And why didn’t he call out Obama’s self-styled demagoguery? And what about the “confusion, discontent and distrust” sowed by Obama via the media (e.g., health care, Benghazi, Fast and Furious and on and on)? 

   “Still, the vast majority of journalists have toiled and continue to toil faithfully in pursuit of nothing other than the truth,” boasts Pronovost.  But again the media is controlled by its corporate owners and their ideological bent.  Pronovost and others don’t give a damn about the truth.  They are ideologues. Hypocritically, Pronovost proclaims, “And like you, we care deeply about what happens locally, nationally and internationally.”  And yet he sure as hell does not care what happens locally when it happens to his friends or elite community members, which is why he refused to publish news about a local senior citizen (me!) permanently banned from his library. Pronovost is a hypocrite! He cannot bear to be criticized, which is why he would never publish this counter op-ed, let alone respond to it.  

    Instead, he oozes more self-glorifying bullshit, distant from reality:  “We research the truth. We hold the powerful accountable.”  Then he echoes the new press mantra:  “No, the American press is not the enemy of the people. The true enemy of any democracy is ignorance, and the only way to battle ignorance is through the acquisition of knowledge: a single set of well-researched, incontrovertible, unbiased facts.”  The press is not the friend of the people when it consistently reports with bias and is not inclusive.  It is an enemy of democracy because it has been purposefully pushing ignorance, for example, regarding Islam.   Thus the only way to battle the ignorance pushed by the press is to battle the press.  Pronovost concludes again hypocritically, “We welcome that scrutiny and look forward to continuing to provide you with the facts.”  Clearly, he does NOT welcome that scrutiny!  In fact, he will not even contemplate it, let alone respond to it. And I have sent out plenty of letters to his deaf ears.  

   Finally, how can we, the people, have confidence in the press when editors openly/officially back one political candidate over another?  How can we have confidence in the press when far too many of its journalists partake in the ideology of identity politics and Islamism?  Clearly, the Boston Globe is not a free and independent press, nor is the Cape Cod Times!  An ideologically-bound editorial board will never be independent, let alone free.  Today, newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe are focused on their ideology more than ever.  Has anyone ever read a positive piece on Trump in those papers?  Has anyone ever read a story in them on a black man who killed a white cop?  When the press is actively engaged in creating an alt-reality by willfully highlighting stories that fit that narrative, while willfully suppressing stories that counter it, then it behaves as an enemy of democracy and should be called out for that…  
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NB:  The Boston Globe has refused to publish any counter-opinion like the one above that I've sent to it.  That too is a problem of the elite press journalists today.